


faulty heart

by ooka



Series: heartbeat [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:02:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25512523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ooka/pseuds/ooka
Summary: Tony dies on a Monday.(He walks out of the infirmary on Wednesday.)
Series: heartbeat [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1852696
Kudos: 31





	faulty heart

Tony dies on a Monday. The first one in May. It's simple, in the end. The arc reactor fails for a moment, his heart stutters, and he falls.

Pepper comes in sprinting, her heels left behind in the elevator as JARVIS had called for her. There is a rip in her dress so she can move faster.

Tony hit his head on the way down, had been welding and burns himself on his right arm. He is a mess of blood, and his heart isn't beating. The arc reactor repels the metal in his heart steadily, but the heart itself is still. 

Tony has been dead for five minutes.

  
  
It takes five times to get his heart restarted. 

It will start, pumping weakly and then stutter to a stop and Pepper has to say a ragged “ _again”_ and watch as the machine shocks Tony. Watches as his body arcs, listens to the beeps start and hold her breath until they crash again.

She can’t hold his hand, so instead she curls her fingers into fists and prays to anyone, everyone, that he will win this fight, just this one.

He only needs to win one.

“ _Again_ ”

(He wins that fifth time, right when JARVIS is starting to sound...Pepper doesn’t think about it. Pepper doesn’t break into sobs, she can’t. The medical crew is there, rushing into the room. All she does is take a ragged breath in and stand up.)

  
  
They warn about brain damage. They stress it. Repeatedly. "You died Mr Stark," a nurse states in a carefully bland tone.

"We have heard you say that, repeatedly," Pepper utters, after the 10th time in three hours. She had been tense and quiet. There is blood staining her white dress from the previous day. "So take that tone and _correct it_."

The other nurse in the room takes a step back and the one who had spoken realizes what is happening, and Tony squeezes Pepper's hand and thinks _thank you for her._

She stands there guard and when he says he wants to leave. Wants out. Wants to sleep in his own bed, she forces them to allow it. Does not allow herself to be cowed. 

_Thank you for her,_ he thinks on repeat.

  
He stays in the infirmity two days before he walks out. 

"I can't sleep,” he says. "There is nothing wrong with me."

His heart is beating strong. They keep checking his blood sugar, just in case they need to rush him off to surgery. But beyond that, there is nothing besides the beeping and the continued check-ins with no changes.

“You died,” a doctor stresses. 

“There could be damage due to the amount of time you were dead,” another adds, before falteringly continues, “to your heart. To many things.”

“We’re recommending a device be implanted,” the third declares, like that’s it. That’s all the opinions that matter here.

Tony can see Pepper, see what she won’t say in the way she looks to him. _What do you want to do_ , she asks with her eyes while her hand clings to his. 

He wants the familiar, he wants to sleep. He wants to have not pushed himself too hard. He doesn’t want the gash on his head or the burn bandaged on his arm. 

“I already have a device,” he states. “Anything else will affect the arc reactor, and I won’t be having that.”

“We could replace your heart with a pacemaker.”

A pacemaker is a limitation. He will be kicked in the chest, doubled over, if the machine malfunctions. JARVIS won’t be able to watch it. It won't work with the suit. A pacemaker has never been an option. 

“No,” Tony says. “Get me the discharge papers.”

“Insurance won’t cover this if you are discharged against our advice,” the first doctor urges, like it matters. Like there isn’t enough in the account to cover this. And if there isn’t, he can pull some designs out of the vault and release them and make back all the charges in a quarter. He can sell some stock.

For most it would work. For Tony, it doesn’t even rate.

He leaves three hours later.

  
  


Pepper tells Rhodey, who finishes his mission and then flies across the world to be at Tony's bedside. He holds Tony's shaking hands, Tony's shaking body, and talks about everything and nothing.

He fills the air so Tony can't think, doesn't have to think. His phone rattles in his pocket until Rhodey turns it off.

(He is set back a promotion or five, and Tony always does this ruins everything he touches. Rhodey doesn't know of his career is because of his connection with Tony or in spite of it.) 

Tony tries to apologize and all Rhodey says, as if they are talking about the weather, "I don't give a fuck."

"But," Tony starts before Rhodey looks at him.

"I love you you asshole." 

Tony swallows down any other words, reads between the lines of weary gratefulness of Rhodey's eyes that Tony is here, pulse under the purposeful spread of his fingers over Tony's wrist. The way he watches the reactor glow.

"I love you too," he says instead. He means it.

Rhodey turns back to the window and takes in a shaky breath for a while, before he begins narrating a story from college that Tony corrects his absolute _lies_ with loud interjections. (He actually yells "I OBJECT" and they both dissolve into helpless laughter for too long, but they both breathe easier, after.)

They cling to each other, hand on wrist and hand over the hand, for the days ahead.

Tony didn't see a light. He was dead, and then he wasn't. Same as before. He says that, out loud, once to JARVIS. He doesn’t tell anyone else. 

“I don’t believe I would ever see a light either,” JARVIS replies, carefully.

Tony smiles against the thought. “We’re one in the same, aren’t we?” he muses.

“ _Yes_.” 

He's died before, when they put the arc reactor in. They had to stop his heart.

Frankly, when Tony thinks about it, he dies a lot.

  
"I'm pulling back," he says on a video call with the Avengers. The suit needs the arc reactor and Tony doesn't know if he can trust it, if he can trust _himself_. "I can control the suits remotely and provide air support that way, but I needed too much at SI to be out and about all the time.

The others protest, but it's a token protest. They don't know. They can't see the gash on his head through the display with the projection of his face in the tower. 

Well, Natasha knows. 

She's silent. Tony watches her, because he knows Pepper has told her (had asked his permission to tell her) because she couldn't breathe around the idea of watching his heart stop and start five times under JARVIS' careful direction and standing there, covered in his blood, hoping that the fifth time was the final time. Hadn’t ever thought she would be in this situation. Maybe she would find out he had died after a mission. But never be in the middle of it.

“Okay,” Natasha states. The room quiets, even though Captain America ( _call me Steve_ he had said enough times, exasperated. And Tony remembers that, but disregards it.) looks heavily disgruntled at the loss of a major air support Avenger, again. “Take care of what you need to take care of. We’ll figure it out.”

 _Be safe,_ she is telling him. _Be healthy._

Tony nods, a small _Thank you_ he will never voice. They both know that.

He ends the call shortly after that.

  
  
  
Rhodey tells him later, in June, about how he had repeated himself. How his short term memory had been shot, but he could talk through a PCB design he had been working on for a keyboard, cursing circuits and threading.

“It’s better this way,” Rhodey whispers. “You are better now. You are here, and it will be okay.”

He says it like he has to reassure himself, and Tony is too far away, too tired and worn down to the bare essence of himself, just trying to heal and sleep, to add anything.

 _I didn’t want to go anyway_ , he thinks softly before sleep claims him.

  
  
He spends a lot of time in bed, just breathing, thinking about brain damage. What that means for him, for SI, for the Avengers, if the one thing he always has had _fails_ him.

His hands shake under the weight of this. He shakes under the weight of this.

Tony hasn't felt this scared since he was in a cave in Afghanistan, holding a battery and trying to find a way out. 

He has been dead longer this time than he had been under Yinsin's care. But Yinsin had worried about brain damage then too. Had quizzed him, had made Tony talk, rambling sorts of paths of questions as Tony replied, one after another. 

No one does that this time around. They are all too careful, treating him like glass. Like they don’t know what to do. (And they don’t. He keeps these things close, typically. No need to scare them away with another complication. He isn’t an obligation, he is a human. He is _his own_ human. He will not pull them down with the weight of his issues.)

It takes him six weeks, but he goes back to the lab, eventually. 

  
  
The nurses voice rattles in his head still though. “He has brain damage. He _was dead.”_

Tinkers cautiously on his projects, testing things again and again. Runs three times the simulations he typically would before telling JARVIS to manufacture something.

He doesn’t pick up anything hot. Watches as JARVIS takes over and controls the machines they had brought into the Malibu house, steadily building the board, assembling a cell phone, or working on.

Tony works more on software, creates a fake username and starts poking around opensource codebases and contributing changes. Watches to see if anyone has any issues in the reviews, or when they use his changes.

It feels like holding his breath, every time he clicks merge. When he tests something he’s designed. Looking for the fault-line inside himself, the crack that he’s missed. 

It takes four months before he feels like he can trust his own mind. 

It’s the worst four months of his life, including Afghanistan, his parents sudden death, the way Jarvis’ mouth had shaped, but couldn’t voice the word _son_ and Anna held his hand. It feels like the pit in his stomach every time Peggy looks at him and says, “Oh Howard, what trouble have you gotten into now” so fondly.

But like all things, it gets better, less of a gaping wound and more of a tidy scar. He’s always smiled and laughed for those four months, but he didn’t _trust himself_. 

He’s learning to again, and that is enough.


End file.
